Scholarship

If I were a high school history teacher, I’d assign my students the project of selecting one year from before they were born and to find a library with newspapers from that year, then to read the entire year of at least one of the newspapers. Two or three would be better, of course. They wouldn’t have to read each one all the way through, of course, but they would have to select at least one or two news articles from each paper to read in its entirety.

I once did pretty much exactly this for two New York newspapers for 1911, Hearst’s New York American and The Morning Telegraph (not a Hearst paper), because Damon Runyon wrote for the former and Bat Masterson wrote for the latter. I had a story in mind, and I managed 20,000 words of it, though I’d need to get back to the source material to do any more of it. It took a particular mindset, and that mindset came only with full immersion.

That’s more or less my first point here, that history looks a lot different when it’s happening, and primary sources are essential. Otherwise, you’re just taking sides in what amounts to literary criticism, comparing the narratives assembled by different historians, each with their own notions of what parts are important. That’s true with the newspaper accounts also, of course, but the narrative tissue is often easier to unwrap when it’s been hastily conjured in an ephemeral publication.

My experience also left me with a certain unease about historical fiction generally, including alternate history. Part of that comes from a realization that I had that it’s impossible to do historical figures justice in a modern narrative. Their actions made sense to them, embedded as they were in their own times, but modern audiences will not abide a true re-creation of those times (how many previous years’ bestsellers are even in print nowadays?), and translation to modern sensibilities smothers the real individuals.

I don’t have that sort of problem with out-and-out historical fantasies; it’s understood (at least by me) that the Edison or Coleridge that you encounter in a Tim Powers novel isn’t meant to be the real guy, and anyone who confuses them has trouble telling fact from fiction in the first place.

The problem is hardly limited to history, is it? Amy sometimes does transcription work, and seems to have found a small niche amongst a certain sort of documentary filmmaker. As a result, we have videotapes of various people talking about Sam Wagstaff, who was Robert Maplethorpe’s lover, patron, and promoter, and who was, as much as anyone, responsible for the shift in the consideration of photography as fine art. One of the interviews is with Patti Smith, who lived with Maplethorpe for a time in the 1970s, and whose presence, judging by the video, is absolutely riveting. That may be just the fan in me talking, since I consider Patti Smith as one of the artists in the 20th Century who kept the word “poet” from becoming something risible. But however you figure it, I’ll bet that the eventual documentary doesn’t feel the same as the original source material, because there will be someone else’s notion of the narrative in between.

Another one of the transcription projects concerned the movement to ban military recruitment from high schools and colleges. There we got to see an interview with Cindy Sheehan, talking about her son Casey. This was several months before Sheehan became famous, and the raw emotion and the severity of the injury to her soul was just nakedly displayed. This is one of those cases where the competing pro and anti-war narratives have done a substantial job of smothering the original truth of the matter. But the original source material destroys all subsequent storylines, starkly projecting the central image of a woman shattered at the loss of her child.

Real history doesn't play into narrative that well. It often misses the good tricks. I had certain reasons for reading newspapers from 1911, reasons that didn't include the occurance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A novelist would have had some foreshadowing, but with newspapers, you just turn the crank on the microfilm reader and suddenly you are staring at one of the most famous tragedies of the early 20th Century. No good storyteller would just hit you in the face like that, but history is a story made up after the fact, while original events are facts on the wing.

On Lying

I’m pretty sure it was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Jubal Harshaw says “…the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth - then to shut up.” This is about as misbegotten a bit of advice that Heinlein ever gave. Not that there aren’t plenty of people who believe the advice; it’s just that it doesn’t work that well.

I remember a documentary on I. F. Stone, in which he disclosed that the real secret of his journalism was in listening to the exact words of politicians and government officials in order to spot the slight verbal tics that indicated the legalistic lie, the carefully worded truth meant to convey the wrong impression. I have a friend who was positively incensed when he learned of Clinton’s mislead, saying “I did not have an 8 year long affair with Jennifer Flowers,” when actually it was a 12 year affair. I’ve lost touch with my friend, so I don’t know how he felt about Cheney/Tennet’s description of the link between Saddam and bin Laden: “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade” which translated to “there have been no real contacts for the past 10 years.”

But I am reminded of a quote I recall from a high official in the last days of Polish communism, “The purpose of propaganda is not to get people to believe lies. The purpose of propaganda is to kill the idea of truth.” Twisting truth is more dangerous than merely telling lies; when the truth twists, the very ground beneath your feet becomes treacherous.

I happen to be a close to incompetent liar. I’m just not very good at it. So the Heinlein prescription held some attraction when I was younger and more naïve. But twisted truth still has threads of truth in it, and is easier to pull apart than a well-constructed fabrication. So let me start with the advice, if you’re going to lie, then tell a lie. Be a mensch. At least admit to yourself that you’re making it up. That, at least, saves you from the conceit that you’re better than those you’re lying to. The lie-by-telling-the-truth game lets you tell yourself that it’s your audience that’s too dim-witted to figure out what you’re really saying.

The next important point is that narrative is important. The best lies tell a good story, one with all the proper narrative tricks, like foreshadowing and thematic resonance. All well and good.

But the most important thing about a good lie is to tell your audience what they want to hear. And what they most want to hear is that they are important, they are worthwhile, and they are better than someone else.

That's also my advice on how to write popular fiction, too. And I have trouble with the "popular" part, another indication as to just how poor a liar I am.

Maybe It's That Simple

I'm having more of a slog through the latest issue of Helix than usual, partly because of a recurrent back spasm that renders me intermittently immobile, but also because I usually start with the John Barnes column, The Well-Bitten Hand, and there's a lot to gnaw on this time. To begin with, Barnes is telling us what being a semiotician means to him, and since he gets paid to be one, it's a good thing to pay attention to what he says, money being what it is and all.

Also, in the first part of his essay, he's dealing with some of the issues that are often trotted out when people discuss science fiction, and, more specifically, why some people don't like science fiction, and perhaps why some people have trouble reading science fiction. This is often summed up in the phrase, "The door dilated," which is supposed to signal the savvy SF reader that we're not in Kansas anymore, but which troubles the regular reader, because, perhaps, we're not in Kansas anymore.

I'm actually giving away a bit of my own argument here with that last sentence, because the sort of literary analysis that Barnes is critiquing calls these things "reading protocols," and suggests that non-sf readers either do not possess the protocols that make sf readable, or they do not enjoy using those protocols.

My own suggestion, which Barnes does not really mention (though I'm sure he's considered it), is that some people just don't like science fiction. It's not as if this is a feature of the landscape that is confined to literature; there are plenty of sf movies, tv shows, comics, etc., and there are many, many people who simply don't care for them. The same is true of various sorts of fantasy. A friend of mine had a long-running (and joking) argument with his wife and daughter about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. They loved it; he refused to even watch it. He preferred The Sopranos, which is a different kind of wish fulfillment fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. He even agreed with this when I pointed it out. However, he still preferred The Sopranos.

Similarly, there are currently entire genres that are, by classical standards, science fiction, but which regular science fiction readers disdain because they don't speak to whatever said sf readers really want. I'm thinking here of the cross-genre romances, the paranormal romances, the time-travel romances, and so forth, which spoil all the good sf action with that "chick lit" stuff.

In any case, I'm pretty sure that Barnes skips over this part of the argument because he wants to get on about reading protocols generally, and what he calls "dip and flip," as a result of a series of observations he's made of people reading in public places:

One thing stood out vividly: about half the observed readers who appeared to be under 35 began each new page by looking at the center, scanning outward from there in a sort of loose clockwise spiral, and then beginning to read left-right-diagonal-down once they had found something of interest. From eavesdropping I could tell they were looking for a word or phrase to catch their attention, checking back to contextualize it, and then reading only as long as the text was still about that word or phrase (or until another word or phrase took over as focus of interest). And like many of the ad-readers and sentence-excerpters, their conversation indicated that for them, that word or phrase was what the article was "about."

(I put "about" in quotation marks because in different reading protocols "about" seems to mean something different to some readers than it does to others.)

Barnes correctly notes that the "dip and flip" protocol screws up any attempt to convey ordered information, so it is particularly vexing to technical writers and the writers of clean, linear fiction. Indeed, as a card carrying member of both groups, let me suggest that Barnes is being very kind by not suggesting the traditional label for such reading protocols: functional illiteracy.

Of course this is an argument that goes back forever, and includes the Evelyn Woods "Speed Reading" controversy of decades ago.

"What is astonishing is that they think that 80% comprehension is enough. Kennedy was a speed reader. 'Bay of Pigs?' That must have been in that other 20%." –The Firesign Theater.

Barnes spends the rest of the article on providing some tips for how stodgy old linear writers can tap into the "dip and flip" market, primarily by telling their stories in small, bite sized chunks, each of which must have a sugar glaze and a crunchy center. And, truly, I'm pretty much fine with that as far as it goes. Make the scenes shorter, put in some self-contained vignettes, make both geography and point-of-view less static, and more energetic, sure. I'd have done even more of that in SunSmoke, if I'd thought I could get away with it.

But, ultimately, I don't think that there is as much gold in them thar hills as we'd like to think. It's true that the number of casual readers dwarfs the number of dedicated ones, but it's not obvious that one can make all that much of a cake from crumbs. And if I want to really connect with a readership, I think I'll go after readers who want to connect back.

A Bit More on a Frequent Subject

[Originally posted to my newsgroup, July 26, 2007]

I've been ruminating about that sub-genre of stories that I'm such a pest about: stories that use fantasy tropes as part of a real world story involving characters having fantasies.

If I were doing, say, an academic thesis, a course syllabus, or an academically oriented collection of stories on this theme, one thing I'd be doing is to try to trace back the origins of the form. But there it gets tricky. One can, for example, read many Bible stories that way, with the result that, for example, the story of Abraham and Isaac gets very creepy. Kierkegaard, got a whole book, Fear and Trembling, out of that one.

Alternately, many folk tales, myths, legends, etc. are examples of "magical realism," where miraculous and magical things take place and the characters accept them as real and realistic, albeit perhaps a bit extraordinary. By contrast, people having fantasies is very ordinary, and those fantasies affect their behavior, in ways ordinary and extraordinary.

The first short story that I can find where a character's fantasies dominate the narrative is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." That's typical, since Poe did almost everything first.

This sort of storytelling is quite common in cinema, so common nowadayds that it barely registers when we are given glimpses of a character's internal landscape. One can easily trace such conventions back at least to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which takes place almost entirely in the mind of a madman, with the audience not privy to that fact until near the end of the film.

By contrast, we're told at the outset of Don Quixote that the poor fellow is crazed, and we are seldom shown more than a glimpse of how the world looks to him. Come to think of it, that might make a good story.

In "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the fantasies rarely have an effect on the character's external actions, save for the implication that his inner landscape is either an escape from his drably normal life�or the cause of it. In "That's What Happened to Me," by Whitt Burnett, the very grandiosity of the events described tell us how sad the life of the narrator really is. In The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, the last chapter is set in the character's fantasy world, a world now so bizarre and changed that the reader can only guess at the final circumstances of J. Henry Waugh.

But notice the jump of centuries between Quixote on the one hand, and Caligari and Mitty on the other. What exists in between? One very trite example is the "it was only a dream" stories, elevated only if the dreams are of high enough quality (Alice's Wonderland, Little Nemo's Slumberland), and we don't really see the exterior world sufficiently to judge the effects of the fantasies. By contrast, Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" is rife with repercussions.

A more difficult trick is to write a story where both the fantastic and the mundane interpretations are equally valid. The tour de force of this is Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm, or maybe that's just my interpretation. All other reviews I've ever seen of the book (and Lindholm's own comments on it) indicate that readers generally believe that the fantasy dominates and that the "mundane" sections are simply magical attacks (of some sort) on The Wizard. Still, one reads the books one reads, and not the ones that others read.

Destiny Time Three

I recently reread Destiny Times Three, by Fritz Leiber. Given that Leiber is my favorite science fiction and fantasy writer, and DT3 is possibly my favorite of all his longer works, it may not require explanation as to my purpose in the endeavor. However, given that I don't even mention DT3 in my long essay on Leiber, "Sleeping in Fritz Leiber's Bed," I may have some 'splaining to do. Moreover, there was at least one ancillary purpose that bears exploring.

In his autobiographical writings, Lieber says that his original conception of Destiny Times Three was grandiose. He intended a work of around 100,000 words at a time when "complete novel in this issue" meant a novella of maybe 30-40,000 words, and 60,000 words was the standard length for a book.

But DT3 was a victim of the WWII paper shortages, and, by editorial demand, Leiber cut it down to the more standard "short novel" length, so that it could fit into two consecutive issues of Astounding, losing, by his own account, all of the female characters and a great deal of the richness of the worlds he'd created. I had something similar happen to me with the magazine version of "SunSmoke," but I got to make up for it somewhat when I expanded it to book length. Leiber's full version of Destiny Times Three is lost forever.

Dammit.

The general story of DT3 is that there are parallel worlds, but not due to the natural workings of physics, etc. Instead, sometime in the late 19th Century, an alien device was found by a fellow who fancied himself a scientist. He enlisted the assistance of seven other individuals, because it took eight minds to operate the thing, and they used it to slowly create a "utopia," by splitting the world at crucial decision points, observing which world was most to their liking, then "destroying" the "experimental control" worlds. Very scientific.

In fact, they had not destroyed each of these worlds, but merely placed them beyond their own ability to access them, "swept them under the rug" as it were.

The protagonists on Earth 1, the utopian world, are Thorn and Clawly, who rather closely resemble Fahfred and Gray Mouser, or, more accurately, Lieber and his friend Harry Fischer, at least in their imagined incarnations. It's also not a great leap to consider the duo as Thor and Loki (or Loke, as Leiber spells it), given the former's name and the latter's specific comparison to Loke as the tale unfolds. Also, Norse imagery is an ongoing motif throughout the story.

On Earth 1, the power of "subtronics" has been harnessed, subtronics being a Campbellian trope for a sort of "unified field theory" that can also be found in Heinlein's Sixth Column/The Day After Tomorrow, itself a reworking of material supplied by John W. Campbell. All have access to its power, and the unparalleled freedom that results, anti-gravity cloaks and almost total environmental control (the book begins with a description of a "symchromy," an optical symphony on a grand scale) being throwaway mentions in the first couple of pages.

On Earth 2, subtronics was kept as a secret by "The Party" and a totalitarian state was created. Later in DT3 an Earth 3 is discovered to exist, where an attempt was made to suppress the discovery, with a resulting war that destroyed most of humanity and ripped open the Earth's crust to such an extent that rapid geological weathering removed so much CO2 from the air as to produce an ice age. This may be the first mention of the "greenhouse effect" in science fiction, incidentally.

There are versions of Thorn in all three worlds, and versions of Clawly on at least Earth 1 and Earth 2. But on Earth 1, they are fast friends, and Earth 2, they are bitter enemies, the difference being primarily Clawly's personalities. On Earth 2, he is a Party member, while the Earth 2 Thorn is part of the Resistance, such as it is.

But despite the fact that the connections between the worlds has been severed by the "experimenters" who now live outside of normal time, the worlds are not totally separate. There remains a connection between individuals who have duplicates on other parallel worlds: They dream each other's dreams. The dream visions of utopia are a grinding torment to those who live in the totalitarian dystopia. And as a result of this desperate yearning of millions of minds, the barriers between the worlds are beginning to blur. Sometimes, someone goes to sleep in one world, and awakens in another.

So the plot thickens, events transpire, and eventually there is considerable resolution. You can find DT3 in various versions on either Amazon or ABE books. Wildside Press seems to be promising a release, but it doesn't appear on their website, so caveat emptor. I have both the Binary Star reissue (which also contains Spinrad's "Riding the Torch," it's printing as Galaxy Novel #28, and the two original issues of Astounding. I told you I liked it.

Lately, I have been haunted by that initial vision from Destiny Times Three, the portrait of a world of people yearning so profoundly for something better than what they have that the walls of reality have begun to crumble. Or, if you will, think about people who are so enamored by a dream life that they cross over and take up living there.

A minor point in the book, it's true, but still…

We have news items that World of Warcraft gamers have died from devoting so much time and energy to the game that they neglected such matters as eating and sleeping. Second Life seems to sometimes create an almost religious fervor and perhaps a Ponzi scheme in those who choose to spend a lot of time there. Such things are hardly new, of course. Many of us recall the guy who got into Dungeons and Dragons just a little too enthusiastically, or the fellow who tried to use his SCA credentials for something out in the real world. There are "RenFaire" bums, just as there are those who have tried to spend their entire adult lives surfing. Sure, I get that.

I also get that we seem to have switched "autobiographical fiction" with the "fictional autobiography." The former is pretty inevitable; the latter seems a lot more fraudulent, doesn't it?

Then there are the "reality shows," made so very omnipresent by the writers' strike. Most such fair is just new variations on old game shows, but some of it shows a new sort of creepy voyeurism for voyeurism's sake, where the old line about a celebrity being "famous for being famous" gets too close to the truth.

What is the result when millions of people yearn for fame as the only thing they can imagine that will fill their emptiness? Do the walls of reality begin to crumble when everything becomes a reality show?

Ah, sure, I'm just being dyspeptic here, or maybe even dystopian. It's still possible to live a normal life. But I do get a little peep of horror when I consider how extraordinary an effort that can take.

A Joke, a Variation, then Aphorisms

Joke:

An economist and some students were walking on the campus and one of the students says, “There’s a twenty dollar bill on the ground.” The economist replies, “That’s impossible. If there were, someone would have picked it up already.”

Variation on joke:

Person #1: You know, they get health care in Canada that's just as good for less money.

Dr. Pangloss, the Doctrinaire Believer in Economics as Revealed by Someone or Another: That's impossible. If that were true, I'd have already moved to Canada.


Some Aphorisms

"The problem with people who have no vices is that they tend to have some pretty annoying virtues." -- [paraphrased] Elizabeth Taylor

“What if this weren’t a hypothetical question?” -- Unknown

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

A man goes to a psychiatrist. The doctor says "You're crazy" The man says "I want a second opinion!" "Okay, you're ugly too!" – Henny Youngman

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.

A hostage to fate -- the first time I heard that phrase, I had no idea what it meant. Now I do. Fate could call me on the phone anytime and say, "I have your granddaughter," and I'd say, "I know you do," and Fate would say, "What would you do to get her back?" and I'd say, "Anything," and Fate would say, "It doesn't work that way." – Jon Carroll

[W]hat exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety? – Jonathan Lethem

“Someone stole my identity and I feel sorry for him.” – T-Bone Burnett

“If you’re so poor, how come you’re not dumb?” – Merle Kessler

There are no atheists in foxholes; even atheists pray to the bombs overhead, that they may fall upon their fellows and not upon them.

I cried because I had no shoes, 'till I met a man who had no feet. So I said, 'You got any shoes you're not using'? – Steven Wright.

"I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy." Mel Brooks

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally – J. M. Keynes

The plural of anecdote is conjecture. – B. Sano

A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what is “meta” for?

Two psychiatrists meet in a hall. One psychiatrist say to the other, “Hello.” The second psychiatrist thinks to himself, “Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that?” – old joke

"'Either way is fine with me' gets me though a lot of situations." Randee of the Redwoods (Jim Turner)

"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." from Jingo by Terry Pratchett

“Versatility is a curse; one-dimensional people make all the money.” – Jonathan Winters

Half empty or half full depends on whether you’re drinking or pouring.

Tough love is always about the tough, never about the love.

A coward dies a thousand deaths, but the first nine hundred and ninety nine aren’t that big a deal.

If a lizard lays an egg that hatches a chicken, is it a lizard egg or a chicken egg?

It is unfair to ask someone to save the world before they have learned to save themselves.

It’s Grrreat!

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim a few years ago, I was on the H. G. Wells panel. I reported the upshot of a discussion I had with some friends years ago, the basic question being “Are there any science fiction novels that are both great novels and great science fiction?” I reported that the only novel that we could generally agree as fitting both criteria was Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Well. You can imagine. My, what a brief ruckus, brief being operative because the moderator of the panel soon simply said basically, “Move along folks. Nothing to see here.” But there were plenty of suggestions that were taken as clear proof that I was wrong, wrong, I tell you, so many, many, novels that everyone agreed were great in every sense of the word.

Except most of them weren’t, and all were highly debatable.

Now obviously what I’m getting at here is the difference in standards of judgment that one applies to science fiction as opposed to general literature. Part of that argument is the difference between general literature and genre literature. Another, more subtle point is the difference between the novel and shorter works of fiction. There are any number of science fiction and fantasy stories that stand up to any short story in English literature. I read Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” in a 6th grade literature book, for example.

But novels are a harder sell, especially for science fiction, which isn’t really a genre that is well-suited to the novel. Science fiction, as such, is about ideas and speculation, and it’s hard to stretch an idea to book length. So you have to put more into it, and the “more” is often either inferior to the original conception, or is more like “ordinary” literature. Over the past several decades, for example, SF has become more “character oriented.” This is fine, but it rarely adds to the science fiction content per se.

Of course there are no objective standards for “great” in art, or anywhere else for that matter, but one can point to criteria that need to be fulfilled before something can be legitimately considered as great. In general literature, it’s easy to come up with at least a partial list:

The prose quality should be high; transcendent is better still.

It should be culturally influential. It should have cultural impact. It should add images, phrases, and concepts to the general intellectual discourse of the culture. “Quixotic” and “tilting at windmills” are part of world culture, and that fact is part of why Don Quixote is a great book.

It should be influential in the literary sense. It should inspire other writers to imitate it, copy it, and steal from it. It should also inspire other works in other arts, such as theater, motion pictures, painting, or whatever.

It should be broadly read, at least at some point in its life.

It should stand the test of time, connecting to audiences past its nominal shelf life.

So what about science fiction? How does a work get to be great science fiction? Well, SF is a literature of ideas, as noted earlier. The ideas should be novel, interesting, stimulating, and well-communicated. If the SF is future-oriented, it should convey real insights into the actual future. It doesn’t necessarily need to be predictive, although that’s certainly a plus, but it should make the future that does occur easier to understand. That applies generally, in fact. Great science fiction should make whatever it is writing about easier to understand.

Then, of course, there is the “gosh wow” factor, that ol’ sensawanda. It should be more than merely intellectually stimulating. Great SF stimulates the poetic sense.

Finally, like every other genre literature, to really make an impact on readers, even good SF (to say nothing of great), must be aware of the conventions of the genre. It may follow them, play off of them, or break them, but it must know what the genre is and how it functions.

On this last point, War of the Worlds could be said to cheat a little, since it is one of the works that establishes some of the conventions of SF, and many of the conventions came about because later writers imitated Wells. But that’s just another indication of greatness.

So let’s take a few of the works nominated by the panel in rebuttal to my suggestion. For example, Brave New World was mentioned, but, frankly BNW isn’t really that good a novel. It has practically no plot, the characters are writer’s puppets, and at the prose level, Huxley is pretty pedestrian. Or take The Stars My Destination. It’s definitely great SF, but who reads it besides SF readers? And as for literary influence, if someone wants to use the plot, they’ll go to the place that Bester stole it, The Count of Monte Cristo.

I’ve seen a lot of people reference LeGuin’s The Dispossessed_ as somehow typifying great literary SF. If so, the enterprise has failed. Yes, The Dispossessed is taught in schools and universities, but always as science fiction. I’ve looked at some of the academic literature around it, and it’s the SF elements that are taught, not the literary elements. And again, who besides SF readers (and the occasional university lit student) has read it? What influence has it had, other than among dedicated SF readers?

For my own part, I’m much more likely to go with 1984 as filling the “double great” bill. My quibble would be that it’s barely science fiction. It’s ostensibly set in the future, (which, of course, in now our past) but that’s really just for the distancing effect. In that sense, it’s similar to Animal Farm which deals with some of the same themes. Of course the “gosh wow” feature is wholly absent, but that’s par for the course for dystopian futures.

I’d personally also make the argument for Naked Lunch as a great novel and great science fiction. Of course, I then run into the problem that very few SF fans have read it. On the other hand, a Google search on “Naked Lunch” gives many more hits than does “The Dispossessed.” On the other, other hand, the movie version of Naked Lunch was amazing.

One can complain about the “science fiction ghetto” thing, but that’s gotten pretty old, given the amount of SF teaching at the university level and the general penetration of SF tropes into popular culture. Besides, detective fiction was hard core pulp until The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Now it’s an accepted form for serious fiction. For that matter, science fiction is considered an acceptable form for serious fiction, e.g. The Handmaiden’s Tale or Gravity’s Rainbow, but SF readers rarely accept the results as being good SF. So maybe the ghetto thing is self-imposed.

War of the Worlds on the other hand, succeeds on practically all levels. In the literary sense, it put Wells on the map, as it were, and, as SF, it carried along with it descriptions of warfare that were novel in 1898, but all too mundane by 1918. Additionally, it established the apocalyptic novel, introduced the idea of “death by exotic disease” into general public discourse, and made Mars the home of imaginary civilizations for generations that followed. Wells set the bar very high, and SF writers have been trying to jump over it ever since.

Joe Malik’s Dogs

Illuminatus by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, is a monster of a book, published as a trilogy and cut down from an even more gargantuan original manuscript. It is, in fact, much too big an edifice for me to describe here, and I shan’t. I may go at it at bits and pieces some other time.

Robert Anton Wilson, who died in January of last year, is also a complex and complicated subject, a man seriously wired into a particular zeitgeist that is quite recognizable to those interested in it: New Age philosophy, politics, sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, science fiction and several of the attendant pseudo-sciences. Again, too big a subject for the moment.

But Ben and I went to see him once, and that’s a tale to tell.

First off, let me note that I never do this: just show up on the doorstep of some author or celebrity. I mean, it’s rude, no matter how politely you do it. It’s an imposition. It’s all manner of things you shouldn’t do. So I blame Ben. Well, not really, but it sounds better to put it that way.

Wilson, as nearly as I can tell, was used to having things like that happen, although he hadn’t yet the rock star that Illuminatus was going to make him. At the time, only a few months after Illuminatus had been published, he was still living only a few blocks away from U.C. Berkeley, and he was a nexus of one of those intellectual zeitgeist thingees. In fact, he hosted a regular salon, a weekly meeting of Berkeley intellectuals and intellectual wannabes. So Wilson invited Ben and me to the next gathering, which was very kind and gracious of him, see above note about rudeness. He also sold me a copy of Principia Discordia, the photocopied bible of the Discordian Movement, mentioned prominently in Illuminatus. These days, it’s all over the web, but thirty years ago it was pretty rare. I had more than one friend over the years ask for copies of my copy. But, of course, I’d have bought it even if it were crap, again, see the above note about rudeness and consider my wish for atonement.

We did chat with Wilson a bit before we left. We did come back later to his gathering, and that was also much fun, sufficiently so that I became a regular for a while.

Ben and I make a pretty good team. He’s very extroverted, while I’m mildly introverted. He draws people out; I remember what they say. When Ben and I went to Wilson’s gathering we had a fine old time. When we left, Wilson walked us to the door and said, “Loved your act, fellas.” Which is pretty cool.

Then there’s the other thing.

That first conversation often drifted over to things in Illuminatus and I mentioned The Language and Music of the Wolves which is stipulated as one of the central characters, Joe Malik’s favorite records. A while back, in an essay about WRPI, I wrote a little about the grief that said record had caused at the station, owing to its weirdness. It’s a recording of wolf howls in the wild, and not to everyone’s taste, especially not people who wanted their radios to emit music, not wolf howls. But I’d bought a copy (from the bargain bin, of course) and I’d grown to like it a lot, which is why I spoke of it.

“Ah,” said Wilson. “You’ve found Joe Malik’s dogs.”

See, one of the minor mysteries in Illuminatus is “what happened to Joe Malik’s dogs.” His neighbors were always complaining about his dogs, which were against the rules in his apartment building, but no one ever saw them, and, when Malik disappears, the police never find his dogs, either.

Well, of course, there were no dogs, just wolf howls on a record. I hadn’t made the connection, actually, partly because that wasn’t a mystery that I cared about. Or maybe my subconscious had solved the mystery and didn’t bother to tell me. But it did tell Wilson.

I’ve done this more often than you’d think. I once made an innocuous remark to another author that convinced him that I knew of a pseudonym he was writing under, so he proceeded to tell me all about it. I never told him that I had no prior knowledge of the matter, because, well, magicians never explain their tricks, and that’s one of mine.

The Big Mo

I think I need to get the Ayn Rand Institute cooties out of my head, so how about a cosmic ray tangent?

Cosmic rays are pretty interesting, highly energetic charged particles from space. Most are protons, but there's about a 9% component of helium nuclei, and there are even some heavy nuclei like iron in the mix. Prior to the creation of really big particle accelerators, cosmic rays were the only way to study particles having energies of above a GeV. The energy spectrum decreases with increasing energy, but some cosmic rays are way above a mere billion electron volts.

On October 15, 1991 a cosmic ray event was observed with an energy of 3 x 10^20 eletron volts, i.e. 300 billion, billion electron volts, or about 50 joules. There have been a number of similar observations since, confirming the existence of particles so energetic that they must be of recent origin (in the astronomical sense). Otherwise, they would lose energy by interacting with the cosmic microwave background left over from the big bang. The first such particle discovered was dubbed the "Oh-My-God" particle, a joking reference to the nickname of the Higgs particle as "The God Particle."

All very cool, but that's not precisely what this essay is about. No, this essay is about energy and momentum.

Every article that I've ever seen compares the energy of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (as they are called) to some macroscopic object, traveling at a fairly low velocities. Science magazine writers are particularly fond of comparing UHECRs to a strongly hit golf ball. The Wikipedia article on them compares the energy to a baseball thrown at 60 miles per hour.

The thing is, people do not interact with macroscopic objects via their energy content. An object's momentum is what produces force when it encounters another object. If you are hit by a golf ball, and it bounces off you elastically, there need not be a lot of energy transfer, but the momentum transfer (and damage) can be substantial.

Once, on the inevitable science fiction convention panel, during the Q&A, we were asked what we considered to be the greatest scientific error common among the general public. My answer was "the confusion of energy and momentum."

Think of a movie like the Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser, where the MacGuffin is an ultra-high velocity rail-gun rifle. The gun is shown as knocking people backwards, using the old "stunt wire" trick that movies love so much. The problem is that such a weapon would transfer very little momentum to the target (and would have very little recoil). What would happen is that the projectile would basically explode on contact with an interacting mass. To a lesser degree, that is what happens with high velocity rifle shells. Similarly, Hollywood used the stunt wire for practically all gun shots, often giving the impression that a handgun is really a "momentum pistol," like the one seen in Fritz Lieber's The Wanderer.

Meteor Crater in Arizona was originally thought to be of volcanic origin, in part because it was circular, and it was believed that a meteor would almost certainly come down at an angle, producing an elliptical crater. Eventually, experiments with high velocity projectiles confirmed that they produce circular craters from almost any angle.

A fellow on the old Compuserve Science Forum explained it by analogy to throwing a hand grenade. The grenade carries so much explosive energy that it overwhelms the momentum, so if you throw one into a sand box, it will create a circular crater, no matter what the angle it hits. In fact, the ratio of energy to momentum for a meteor is considerably higher than for a thrown grenade.

If you really want to get a feel for the energy of an Oh-My-God Particle, you should compare it to things in ordinary experience where the energy is important. Thus, the energy from such a particle would light a 50 watt bulb for one second. Or it would power a single flash from a mid-size photoflash, perhaps ten from a small flash attachment.

Fifty joules will raise the temperature of one gram of water about 12 degree C, about 22 degrees F.

Or, if you want to stay with the moving mass analogy, how about propelling a mid-size automobile at a speed of a quarter of a mile per hour, assuming you have a friction free environment and some perfect method of converting cosmic ray energy into the motion of a motor vehicle, and, these days, who doesn't have those lying around?

Cheap Records

I’ve been addicted to bargain bins for as long as I’ve known of them. I lost a slew of records in the early 70s, when my apartment was burglarized, but even so, I still have several hundred (vinyl) records dating from that time. It’s not just the lure of getting music for cheap; at remainder prices you can afford to buy things on impulse, just because you like the album cover, or because you vaguely remember having heard something by the artist(s) and sorta kinda remember liking them.

You don’t usually get the mega-hits in remainder bins, though the hits do show up in as used in stores devoted to that purpose (usually not at the cheapest prices, of course). Used vinyl was/is a risky purchase, since even apparently clean albums sometimes have a single, major skip somewhere. CDs are more forgiving, but the downside of that is that more people treat them badly, so used CDs often have pretty ugly surfaces and sometimes those render one or more tracks unusable. Nevertheless, there are often some tricks that can recover the track for ripping if not for straight play. The same holds true for vinyl, there being some wonder-products that clean and even repair (to a very limited extent) the surfaces.

Buying closeout records is sometimes a bit ghoulish. When MGM records failed to option Frank Zappa in 1968, Zappa formed Bizarre Productions, and a good bit of Zappa’s MGM catalog went to remainder, including Lumpy Gravy, which I bought (and then lost to the aforementioned burglary). There must have been something going on with MGM records, because all of the “Boston Sound” artists hit the cheap bins at about the same time. A while later, MGM sold out to Polydor, and another big batch of product hit the remainder shelves, including a number of Verve recordings.

When Tetragrammaton Records bit the dust, I got some Bill Cosby records, plus Steve Barron and some others. The Phillips label also had some financial difficulties, so I own a couple of copies of the classic H. P. Lovecraft II album, and it’s near the top of my list for conversion to MP3.

Realize that buying cheap records doesn’t actually save you any money; you just buy more albums with the same budget, or lack thereof, which is to say, all your disposable income. After I moved to California, I joined a taping club for a while, not so much to save money on any given record, but because the effort involved in taping put a limit on the number of albums I could get at any given time so I saved in the aggregate. The net result of that is a cache of reel-to-reel tapes of some records that are almost impossible to get elsewhere like the Handscapes by the Piano Choir, or Across the Western Ocean by John Roberts and Tony Barrand.

Amy has been involved with a non-profit organization that runs a thrift store, and from time to time a big box of cassette tapes will come in and she’ll get it cheap. One of them was amazing; it had a lot of on-air recordings from KPFA in the mid to late 80s, especially one called “Do Wop Delights” featuring 50s do wop and gospel records (again, some of them so rare as to be unique). There have also been a lot of mix tapes from various people, some of them pretty good music programming (says the conceit of one who thinks he knows). Having those tapes makes the old tape deck in my car more attractive.

There isn’t a single thing that I’ve mentioned in this essay whose purchase put money into the pocket of the recording artist or any other copyright holder. The close-outs do profit the record labels, but that’s about it. Taping clubs pretty much died from threat of lawsuits, just as Napster etc. quit the field owing to legal actions. Neither the demise of Napster nor the end of taping clubs had any real impact on the fortunes of artists, nor would the elimination of libraries assist writers (quite the opposite, as there are some books and even entire small presses that sell mainly to libraries). There are, of course, writers and musicians who’d like to charge rent every time anyone reads or plays anything of their work.

For that matter, paying full price for records benefits a limited number of people. I once had a conversation with a bass player who had just made an album. He explained that the only money anyone in the band really made on the album was from the session fees. The songwriter gets some extra juice, but everything else is water and wind.

On my side of it, if somebody makes some money out of anything I write, I’d like a taste of it. Otherwise, get a bucket and have yourself some free words. It’s a complicated dance, the conspiracy between the author and the audience, and even guys who fill stadiums probably sometimes feel like they’re dancing alone.

Linwood

Linwood Vrooman Carter, aka Lin Carter, was a complicated man paradoxically composed of many simple, albeit sometimes ill-fitting elements. This is often the result of self-invention, and Lin was nothing if not self-invented.

Aside from his own flair for the dramatic and self-promotional extravagance, Lin’s greatest component was that of scholar, reader, and fan of fantastic literature, which included science fiction. That was what I found most attractive about him: the breadth and depth of his knowledge and appreciation for the history and literature of fantasy. He was also a natural storyteller, and more than once I read a work of fantasy that he’d described and summarized, only to be mildly disappointed in the actual work, since Lin’s summation had caught the essence of it and had improved on the presentation.

After he dropped out of advertising (yes, advertising) to become a full time writer, he made a good living for quite a while churning out pastiches of the popular “classics” of fantasy: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and Kenneth Robeson. In the literary sense, he was least successful with Dunsany and Smith, both brilliant prose stylists, which Lin was certainly not. He was most successful, again in the literary sense (and this would be my own, probably idiosyncratic opinion), with his series featuring Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, which managed to be both a pastiche and parody of Doc Savage, a finely walked line that required a near perfect tone. Commercially, I’m sure that the Burroughs and Howard pastiches were most successful; Lin caught the Conan wave at exactly the right time, and that humorless barbarian was easy to clone (the Thongor series) and money in the bank.

I’ll also mention one final attribute of Carter as a writer of fiction, one that was usually given short shrift, owing to the pastiche nature of most of his work: Lin could write humor. The only works where this really shines are in his two Thief of Thoth books (one of which contains one of my favorite bullshit lines of all time: “In n-space you don’t go any faster, you just cover more distance in less time.”) and the Almaric the Mangod story in the Flashing Swords #1. The latter contains the not unreasonable notion that an immortal adventurer must be rather dim in order to not go insane from the memories that accompany extreme age.

Lin’s first significant book of scholarship, Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings also came at an opportune time, and it and others paved the way for Lin to become the editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Lin knew that it was only a matter of time before the Tolkien clones arrived, but rather than himself leading that charge, he took advantage of a window of opportunity to republish the classics of fantasy. If he managed to only bring Cabell and Dunsany back into print his contribution would have been enormous; that he managed to reprint practically every major and minor work of classic fantasy is an achievement so magnificent as to deserve secular sainthood.

Lin was one of the first science fiction and fantasy celebrities that I came to know well, another being Barry Malzberg a combination for which I must credit two members of the Albany Science Fiction Fan Federation (more or less originating at SUNY Albany), John Howard and Ben Sano. Ben was/is a Cabell and Dunsany fan, and Johnny would quote Malzberg’s writings back at him (Note to would be social climbing fans: writers love this. It’s almost as good as being young, attractive, and of the opposite sex).

As an aside, I’ll note that, owing the strange discovery of having mutual fans, Carter and Malzberg became friends, even at one point discussing a collaborative project of mutual interest, pornographic in nature. Go ponder what that would have looked like.

The Albany group, which Lin referred to as “The Albanians,” was an exemplar of fan behavior generally. At one party at Lin’s the toilet was malfunctioning, the handle mechanism having previously broken. Toward the end of the party, Lin confided to me, “Most of the fans I’ve had over here would have made jokes about it or just complained. You folks taught each other how to move the lid and use the coat hanger to reach the chain and flush it.” A little while later, he discovered that one of us had just fixed the mechanism.

His home at its zenith was a collector’s dream, not just for the books and artwork, but also the antique collectables such as the Japanese temple dagger, and the Enzenbacher sculptures. A good fraction of that left when Noel, his second wife, left him, but even after that, “Carter Manse,” was filled with interesting oddities which, of course, included the proprietor, his dog, the Mighty McGurk and sundry other pets, including a goldfish/carp that liked to gum fingers.

Lin tended to live extravagantly, as befitting his self-created persona, and when his luck turned, his extravagances did not serve him well. Similarly, his years of self-promotion had stepped on a toe or two (or twenty), and as money tightened, substantial portions of his collector’s paradise were liquidated, a sad end to yet another artistic vision. His precarious finances also had a hand in the complicated ending of the Gandalf Award, which I have written about elsewhere.

I saw him only a few brief times in his final years; Ben and other members of the Albany crew saw him a bit more often. I have heard from some who say that he became more irascible and impolite toward the end, as might be expected from someone disfigured by surgery and in constant pain, but I’ve not heard from any in the Albany group who ever found him to be anything but courtly and polite. I can’t speak for the others, of course, but I considered him to be a friend, and I believe it was reciprocal.

Lin died in 1988, of cancer of the mouth and throat, almost certainly caused by a lifetime of artful smoking, at the age of 57. This essay is in the nature of a memoir and a belated eulogy. My real tribute to Lin may be found here, and in my story “The Emperor of Dreams.” Godspeed, Lin, wherever that may take you.

Crybaby

The distance created by the passage of time and existential change allows me to say, with practically no ego involvement, that I was a golden child. There are a number of photographs of me in my early years, and I was so cute that it is almost Hitler-Jungen creepy: fair-skinned, hair so light that it typically earned the southernism "cotton-top," bright, attentive eyes and a winning smile. In one photo of my second grade class, even the unprejudiced eye is immediately drawn to the image of the towheaded kid with the ear-to-ear grin.

There aren't any photos of me crying, but I did cry a lot as a child. One telling tale is the one my mother tells of me learning to walk. I would crawl over to the screen door that led outside, pull myself up via the cross slats in the door, turn, take a step or two, fall down and then cry for a minute. Then I would crawl over to the door and begin again. My mom says that I did this for hours.

So we see the early origins of the sort of whiney obsessiveness that has served me so well over all these years.

"High strung" is the phrase that is used for such emotionality, at least in the case of a golden child, for whom everyone makes excuses. My family was tolerant, as were many other adults. My friends were somewhat less forgiving, for the obvious, (and I concede entirely) good reasons. Nevertheless, I got away with it for much longer than would ordinarily be the case in the social system in which I grew up, i.e. the mid-South in the 1950s.

The same can be said of my precocious intelligence. There are some sub-cultures and ethnic groups in these United States where intellect is revered and properly encouraged and guided, but Tennessee in the 1950s was not one of them. Nevertheless, I was again protected from this knowledge for quite a while, by family and accident, plus the simple fact that, however precocious, a young child is generally tolerated, even by the most intolerant of adults.

The hammer finally came down when I was eight, in the third grade, in the form of Mizz R. (not her real name, though I use the correct southern spelling of Mizz). Mizz R. was not well-educated, nor bright, nor particularly good with young children. However, this was Tennessee in the mid-50s, and the three jobs available to white women were secretary, nurse, and teacher. The growth industry was in elementary school teachers. During the peak of the Baby Boom the whole country was throwing up schools like crazy, then putting "portables" behind them to hold the overflow. Class sizes were in the mid-30s, so just keeping control of a class could be an issue.

Given this setup, you can see how it can be a real problem when you have a third-grader who knows more about English grammar and is quicker at arithmetic than his teacher.

One irony of it all was that I still thought that Authority was on my side, or at least on the side of the correct answer. I'm sure that, at the beginning, I thought that I was being helpful when I pointed out the errors that Mizz R. made in class. Truth to tell, if she'd had one whit of sense to her, she'd have taken me aside, explained to me that blurting out corrections in class was disruptive, and that she'd take it as a personal favor if I'd write down any errors I spotted and then slip them to her later, so she could correct the problem in the next class. I'd have gone for that. I'd have even made it "our little secret." It would have been easy to turn me into teacher's pet.

Instead, she was on my case all the damn time. And she really went after my "weakness" which is to say the fact that it was fairly easy to make me cry.

Intriguingly enough, the place where the weepiness really manifested was "playground," the elementary school precursor to "gym class." This meant sports of one sort or another, especially softball in the fall and spring. That was always a weak spot; I tended to cry if my side lost a game. So I was branded a "crybaby," by my teacher and fellow students.

I reflect on this a little and there's a hint of the weird to it, because sports is one of the few places in southern culture were crying after a defeat is acceptable. Even fans are allowed to cry if you've just lost "a big one." But no matter, there was the chink in my armor and Mizz R. slipped the knife in.

So I did what most of the other boys had already learned, from their fathers, or peers, or whomever. I learned to hold back the tears, to cover the reaction with other emotions, especially anger, and resentment. And, I suspect, this led back to more bickering in class, because now I was angry a lot, and I was not misdirecting my anger. No, I knew who the problem was, even if I didn't know all the whys and wherefores.

Some later teachers knew how to harness the little mutant that they'd been presented with. My fifth grade teacher had me working on science demonstration experiments after I'd finished all my other work. (One part of the fight with Mizz R. was over homework. I didn't like carrying books home; she thought that kids should have to do homework. So she kept piling on the work, I kept doing it while still at school, and the other kids suffered the consequences. Sorry guys. My bad). My sixth grade teacher simply let me read in class, so I read the entire World Book encyclopedia during the school term.

Other teachers were, like Mizz R., undereducated bullies, and I locked horns with plenty of them. I believe I held the record for being tossed out of Mr. R's (no relation) eighth grade class, but really, what can you say to someone who has just finished explaining to the class that satellites stay in orbit by balancing the gravitational forces between the Earth and Moon? I don't think I actually called him an idiot; I believe that I said, "That's idiotic."

Well, the interesting thing about all that was that it provided a bond between me and my fellow students. Sure, some of them resented the "brain" that was among them, and thought me full of myself and conceited (fair cop, that). But they knew that my fights with the teachers was their fight as well, and that my occasional victories, or even fights to the draw, gave them some covering fire for their own independent actions. There were times when I got thumbs up from the lower stratum, the shop guys, the "hoods" and "delinquents" as they were nicknamed. And more than one of them turned out to be a pretty decent guy, go figure, just somebody who, at one point or another in the past, had refused to knuckle under.

There was, of course, lasting damage, if one wished to call it that. Like so many men, I do not cry easily, even when it is appropriate to do so. I feel the lachrymatory reflex begin and a counter-reflex pops in, that choked up feeling that says, "No, not now. Hold it in. Don't show the weakness."

But I am fortunate. I know the methods of displacement, projection, identification, and the uses of fantasy and art. I am fairly good at this writing thing, and sometimes I can strike the right balance between distance and emotion. Sometimes I can pull my own strings and write something that can make myself cry.

Terminator

The State of the Union Address left a programming hole on the West Coast, which Fox filled with a re-run of the pilot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I'd seen it already, but hey, it's still fan boy time.

Okay, here's where I realized they had me. Near the beginning, when John Connor is starting his new high school, Cameron Phillips (yeah, and the FBI agent is name Ellison), the "helpful Terminator" sent back by John Connor in the future, is masquerading as a regular high school student, and engages John in some light conversation, just a pretty girl trying to make the new kid feel welcome. And I'm thinking, hey, she's doing a pretty good job of pretending to be just a normal pretty girl.

When they get you thinking that behaving normally is acting, you're have entered the Twilight Zone.

Of course, the main reason for that is Summer Glau, a most righteous battle babe. Formerly, in Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity she played River Tam, a genius girl who'd undergone "treatments" that made her psychic, drove her more than slightly insane, and left her with various triggers that could turn her into a lethal battle babe. So Glau is in danger of being type-cast, but realize that for an actress, being type-cast as a battle babe is actually a career extender. Glau can be playing tough sci-fi or cop roles for the next two or three decades if she so desires.

Glau also does most of her own martial arts stunts, by report, for the simple reason that she can. Indeed, she's far better at it than most, because she has dance training. There's a reason why they call it "martial arts choreography." The point where I went "whoa" in Serenity is in the she-beats-up-everyone-in-the-bar scene, where she kicks someone who has grabbed her from behind in the back of the head.

All of this presents a considerable problem for Lena Headey, who plays Sarah Connor. Even apart from all the damn milf jokes that are going to be running around, it's awfully easy for Glau to steal the spotlight, in a way that is reflected in the plot dynamics of the story they're following. Connor is, in every way, a tough, capable, hypercompetent human being. But she's still only human and she's fighting machines, plus, her main ally in this is also a machine, one that is stronger, faster, you name it. How can Sarah compete?

Moreover, the Terminator story lines just drip Oedipal conflict, and by the way, just how big a bastard is the future John Connor? In the first film, he sends his own father back in time to his certain death, something that must happen for John to be born in the first place, actually. His only real father figure that we've seen has been a killing machine (who also dies—kills himself, actually—while John watches). They seem to be trying to ring in another ersatz father figure in Charlie Dixon, but anyone can tell you that this can't turn out well. If he's really lucky, he'll get out alive.

So, okay, tough mother whose son is the only hope of the world. Check. Robot babe even tougher than the mother. Robot babe has been sent back from the future by the future son, so mother can't just get rid of her; besides, how? Robot babe is far too tough and smart for that.

Also, they're trying to destroy a new technology (Skynet) before it gets off the ground. This is Ted Kaczynski territory, so "every hand is against them." Also, they've already changed time—twice, and John's own origin is a damn time travel paradox, so the plot is bound to get as twisted as the mother-son relationship, or the son-babebot relationship, or just about any other thing that comes down the pike.

I do have one final riff that I'd like to see, but I'm sure it never will happen. In my version, Skynet was actually trying to prevent a nuclear war, and failed. Which drove it insane, so now it's trying to destroy humanity before humanity can destroy itself. Sure, it's a paradox, but hell, in this series, what isn't?

Helix #7

I don't detect much of a theme in this outing for Helix, which is fine. There are a couple of recurring chords, so I'll get to those.

First, however, let me recommend "Drooling Wizards" by Laura J. Underwood. This story has no redeeming social value that I can detect, but who cares when you have an opening like this:

The chronicles of Drooling Proper state that in the history of Upper Drooling, the village had never been without an idiot. This, of course, was before Dumb Willy went off and got himself trampled to death by an irate ram of large proportions. (We shall refrain, dear reader, from listing the more sordid details as to why this occurred and assume that all imaginations will come up with their own). Naturally, the folk of Upper Drooling were aghast to find themselves void one idiot. It left open far too many assumptions about the rest of the good citizens of that fair haven. Besides, how could a proper village function without a proper idiot?

"To this end, the mayor of Upper Drooling, the most Honorable Joseph Dribbling (yes, indeed, he was related to the founders of Dribbling-By-The-Brook several leagues to the north, but there was a nasty falling out within the family, the culmination of which was that Joseph's ancestors left the rest of the Dribblings behind to find sanctuary in Upper Drooling) took it upon himself to declare a state of emergency, and most hastily wrote a letter to the Idiot's Guild in the city of Greater Drooling on the River Drowning.

Mistaken identity, magic gone awry, true love, what more does word candy need?

"Night of the Living POTUS" by Adam-Troy Castro is also slight, albeit with what I suspect is a real visceral horror at the American political landscape, a zombification of the past (personified by American Presidents), and possibly a comment on how the future betrays the past and vice versa. There may be some satire to it, but satire is fragile, and I'll let other readers make their own judgments on that one.

"Suicide Drive" by Charlie Anders and "Family Tree" by Vaughan Stanger may be considered to share a theme, old #1, in fact, Space Colonization. "Family Tree" takes place in an alternate universe where the Apollo Program went a little faster, had a later accident, and wound up putting a colony on the Moon. There is a substantial amount of symbolism and possibly even sub-text operating, with the protagonist, a teacher hitting mandatory retirement torn between immigrating to the Moon or tending to her (objectified via SF trope) memories of her dead husband. This is past vs future again, with the dice loaded for the future.

"Suicide Drive," on the other hand, paints a bigger canvas on the space colonization side (an extra-solar colonization attempt), with a much bigger price, and a smaller canvas for memory: a hidey hole for the son of the Leader who made the colonization attempt, and an unseen interviewer. The old Campbellian future suggested that the world would suffer nuclear war, but that was an acceptable price to pay for nuclear powered space travel and interstellar empire. "Suicide Drive" notes that the alternatives are seldom known in advance. What then?

The implied risks and rewards are more prosaic and personal in "Salvager's Gold," by Selina Rosen. This is a story that could have fit into an issue of Galaxy or F&SF in 1950s, though it wouldn't have made the Year's Best in either. Happy ending, though, and I like it when the trashman gets a happy ending.

"The Last Man's First Year on Earth," by David W. Goldman is far and away the most creepy story in this issue of Helix, and has a pretty good take on what "alien" means as well. It also has some good new drugs that aren't just another kind of speed (I've complained about SF's limited imagination in drugs in the past, and wrote "Tranquility" to try to make up for it), and, if I'm not mistaken, a new sexual perversion, which is something any author can be proud of.

"Seraphim" by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is a hard story to characterize. One might compare is to "A Matter of Muskets" by Berry Kercheval in Helix #4, but the latter was slight, and not as difficult an effect to achieve. "Seraphim" might be an "ancient astronauts" story (although "ancient" here is only 1896), or a Mad Scientist story, or a Secret Society story, or any combination thereof. I will note that it gets the style and tone of a circa 1900 newspaper story almost exactly right, and that is mighty damn difficult and my hat is off to Ms Bohnhoff for that and more.

As always, I remind my readers that Helix is reader-supported, and your contributions give you advance peeks of new issues as well as that familiar warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that your money is not going to the Great Fascist Insect.

Perspective

The first magazine that I edited at RPI was a thing called Perspective. It was a journal of politics and philosophy, founded by a couple of students named Ken Rothschild and Rick Kamens, both of whom were seniors my freshman year. They hadn't done all that much preparing a succession, so there was really no one to turn the thing over to except me, which they did in the spring of my freshman year.

Rothschild deserves a little tangent. He'd won some sort of prize in physics his freshman year, and he was one of those fellows who was always bursting with a hundred ideas at once. The problem was that, of those 100 ideas, 95 of them were crap, 3 were marginal, 1 was good, and 1 was excellent. But he didn't really seem to have a notion as to which was which, so he spent a lot of his time working on crappy ideas. I hope he�s found a good editor somewhere along the line.

Anyway, at a time of student unrest and the "New Left," Perspective had a very strong philosophical bias, and its patron saint philosopher was Nietzsche. This was the Walter Kaufman version of Nietzsche, who was a lot more interesting than the dreary man-into-superman-peering-into-the-abyss-will-to-power guy that most people think of when they hear his name. I once asked Amy about Nietzsche, and she said that she�d always gotten the impression that he was cold and humorless. So I read her a couple of my favorite passages, and she said, "Well, that's just hilarious, isn�t it?" Poor Frederich always had the problem of being too hip for the room.

Anyway, Kamens wrote an article for the first issue of Perspective that I edited, entitled "Science and Tragedy" using Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a spring board for some ruminations on science. I changed the title, for layout and space reasons, and Kamens got pissed, as well he should have. My bad. He wasn't the last person I managed to alienate in my roles as editor during my college years, and I can't think of a single case that wasn't my fault. My only defense is that I don't think I made the same mistake twice.

Perspective was a camera-ready, photo offset print job, and we made good use of the cool fonts you could get with the IBM Selectric typewriter, though we did have to settle for ragged right justification. Later, on the Rensselaer Engineer, we got full linotype justification, though the printer then used the linotype to feed a photo offset. We eventually won some awards for things like layout and such. In fact, as nearly as I can recall, we won awards for almost everything except Editor and Editorials. In case you're keeping score, those would have been the awards that were specifically to me.

I managed to get out two issues of Perspective, plus a special little one-shot called Ellipsis, covering the Moratorium March on Washington. We did Ellipsis on a ditto machine, because I was fascinated by the ditto stenciling process, which allowed multi-colored printing. You were limited to maybe 25-100 copies, but it's not like there were thousands of readers clamoring to read more of the political musings of yours truly. Or even dozens, to be honest.

In the two issues of Perspective, I made maybe 2,000 lame jokes about the title of the magazine. Or maybe 2; memory is a tricky thing. I'd like to think that Perspective was where I first got to thinking about the point-of-view problem in philosophy, but I think it was more like just part of the general background. That was when I was learning about Special Relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, after all, and both of those have their own interesting (and differing) take on what observer means. I'd also taken mechanical drawing in high school, (front, side, top, and perspective views), and I'd been writing amateur fiction since grade school. Point of view was always on the list of interesting topics in each of those endeavors, and yet it still took me many, many, years to generalize the subject.

Ben is of the belief that the discovery of perspective in the graphic arts is one of the most important, if not the most important, ingredients to the Renaissance. He'll even go so far as to suggest that the camera obscura was the defining invention of the time, though he might backpedal a little if you mention moveable type.

Moveable type was an insidious invention. Without moveable type copyright law would never have come about, to mention one unobvious connection. The ability to mass produce books also led to the King James Bible and the Protestant Reformation. Without the ability to put bibles into the hands of the masses, common language translations were unnecessary, and without mass bible reading, why (and how) would the Reformation have occurred? Before general literacy, the Church told you what God said, and as long as they kept their stories straight, how would you ever think otherwise?

I've heard it said that Martin Luthor believed that if common people read the Bible, then they'd interpret it the same way he did. So Luthor had himself a bit of a viewpoint problem. Once people generally got to stick their oars in, all hell broke loose, as it were. The back and forth amongst those who were, each and every one of them, convinced of their possession of the real meaning of scripture, is the stuff of history, i.e. wars, torture, unrest, and revolution.

Then Descartes slipped one in on everybody with Cogito Ergo Sum. His little aphorism made "I" the test of existence, but only in translation, as it were, since there is no first person pronoun in the original Latin. Descartes elevated subjectivity to the level of a first principle, almost without anyone noticing that was what he�d done.

Nietzsche had his own take on the matter. If one's personal relationship to God is the important thing, how about if I relate to God as if he were past tense? "God is dead," Nietzsche wrote, doing a little Snoopy dance on the grave still haunted by the Holy Ghost. Nietzsche had mastered the art of being both humorous and serious at the same time.

Or, as I like to think of it, he had his own perspective on Author Omniscient and he was going to follow it to the vanishing point.

Collaborative

Anyone who knows me, as well as anyone who has been paying attention to these essays here, can attest to the fact that I don't score very high on the false modesty scale. Most would even suggest that I don't score very high on any kind of modesty scale.

So when I say that I'm a pretty minor SF writer, you can believe me. I could do all sorts of handsprings to compare myself with those who have been even less successful than I, but what's the point? There are probably hundreds of thousands of "aspiring writers" in the land, maybe more, and most will never even get past that creative writing course, much less a sale or two to a tertiary market, paying in "fresh fruit and contributors copies," to quote my first agent. But one doesn't compare the minor league baseball player to everyone who ever played ball in high school, or even everyone who every tried out for the minor leagues. A minor leaguer is a minor leaguer because they don't play in the major leagues. Hence the "minor" part.

So: two published novels, an undisclosed number of portion and outline proposals, an unpublished Venus trilogy that I was compelled to write for reasons unknown, plus a few dozen short stories, of which maybe half are published. It's a minor contribution to the field, but if I had not written those works, no one else would have.

Then there is the money angle. There are a lot of ways to parse it, and one of them I've mentioned previously. I've done a bit of work-for-hire writing, which turns out to have paid more (for less labor) than the works for which I hold the copyrights. However, had it not been for the novels and short stories in magazines, I'd have never gotten the work-for-hire gigs, nor would it have been as easy to make the jump from unemployed smog scientist to employed technical writer. Nevertheless, discounting the tech writing career, the total I've made from both the free lance and work-for-hire writing has amounted to somewhere around a year's income, give or take, and remembering that I've had some good years and some truly dreadful ones, and it's sometimes hard to adjust for inflation, etc.

But this is just to segue into a reminder that money isn't the sole judge of merit and worth, though I'll stipulate that if I'd made more money writing SF, I'd have written more of it. You can use money to buy time, and that's an important thing about money.

Let's flip that around, though. We're on the tail end of SF publishing, though maybe not the tail end of SF writing. What that means is that, while the number of book titles has gone up over the past few decades, sales per book have dropped substantially. Moreover, the number of pages per book has also increased substantially, such that a typical SF paperback is now at least twice the length of what it was in, say, the 1950s. Furthermore, sales figures in the 1950s were more than an order of magnitude higher than now, both for novels and the magazines (i.e. the primary venue for short stories). So any given published author in the 1950s reached an audience that was, at a minimum, well into five figures, and not infrequently into six figures or even low seven, even for authors who failed to make "best seller" status.

Now let's subtract money from the equation. What do we have left?

Every book or story takes a certain amount of time to write, and takes a range of times to read, depending upon the reading speed of the reader, and what we can call the "readability" of the book. Obviously a book takes a longer to write than to read, although it's sobering to remember that some writers write at full typing speed, and their full typing speed can be mighty fast. Still, the difference between writing time and reading time is pretty large, and if we toss in the re-reading, revision, proofreading, etc., the disparity become inevitable, even for a rapid writer and a slow reader.

Still, there is also a big disparity between the number of writers and the number of readers, at least for mass market works. Here I am, minor SF writer, remember, and lacking good sales figures on most of my works, but I do know that my first novel sold around 15,000 copies, because they had to go to a second printing, and they had to pay me some more money. I suspect that this was because the publishing house was undergoing an SFWA audit at the time, and wouldn't some more of those be a good thing?

In any case, Book of Shadows (no relation) clocked in at about 70,000 words (editorially trimmed from the original 80,000). It's a bit hard to say how much time I put into the writing of it, since part of it was, shall we say, a "learning experience," taking place over a number of years. More recently, however, I have enough information in how long it takes me (now) to write fiction, and I can crank about 2500 words in a four-hour writing day, which is about how long it take before my brains turn to jelly. Other writers are much faster; some are much slower.

The numbers on this are suspect, of course, since it implies that I can write a 100,000 word novel in 40 days; call it two months of regular work. But as I say, plenty of writers are faster. In the days of the pulps, there were a number of "million worders" who churned out more than a million words a year for quite a few years, and they were using manual typewriters. The trick is to have that much to write about and that many stories to tell. But that's not an issue for someone like me; I have far more stories I'd like to write than time to write them. On the other hand, this doesn't count the time for research, plotting, revision, etc. So everything I say here is ballpark numbers.

For SunSmoke, the matter is even more complicated. I don't have good sales figures, for one thing, and for another, I sold the novelette version first, to Asimov's, and more people read that 15,000 words than the novel, which is three times as long. There is also the matter of "pass around" and used books, and so forth.

But let's pretend that BoS had only the 15,000 readers, and that it took each one an average of three hours to read it (probably low, at 300 wpm, it would take about four hours). That's 45,000 hours of reading, compared to 100-200 hours of writing. Even averaging only 2 written words a minute, it would only have taken 600 hours to write. We're talking hundreds of reader hours for every hour of writing time.

Heck, even here on this blog, checking the page hits and time spent on page, and you folks are spending two or three times as much time reading as I spend on the writing of it.

Reading is not a passive activity. There is real effort involved, and real imagination expended in processing the words to get at a story. The story is different for every reader, often substantially different, and surprising to the writer. Sometimes the writer may even be appalled at what the reader gets from the story, but that's the biz, sweetheart.

Intellectual property laws allow the writer to "own" the story, but it's really a collaboration between writer and reader, in fact, a large number of collaborations, sometimes more than one per reader, even. Some writers (and owners of other forms of intellectual property) believe that they own everything, even what goes on in other people's heads. Put that way it doesn't seem right, does it? But writers are clever folk. We can come up with much better ways of putting it, ways that always make us out to be the heroes.

My Star Trek Novel

Back in the mid-80s, when it looked like I might have a real career in SF (a major illness took care of that fantasy), I wrote a portion-and-outline of a Star Trek novel. It’s around in my files somewhere, but I’m going to reproduce the gist of it from memory. This was, incidentally, before any of the Trek follow-ons, so it was Classic Trek.

The story opens with the Enterprise getting multiple sensor alarms from what, after some investigation, turns out to be an object moving at some ungodly warp number, but rapidly decelerating. Given such rapid slowing, it only takes Enterprise a week to reach the vessel. When they finally arrive, they find the shape of a giant Conestoga Wagon, with what looks like “Antares or Bust” painted on its side.

It turns out to be a ship with “morphing” capabilities; it can change its shape at the whim of its captain, who is the only person on the ship, in fact.

The captain’s name is Tom, and he’s a Vulcan inventor. In fact, he’s pretty much Vulcan’s only inventor, which used to puzzle him. So he looked into the matter and came to the conclusion that the Vulcan education methods for controlling emotion had become so restrictive that they were stifling curiosity, imagination, etc. Therefore, he set out to find a way to reverse the damage,

Tom devised a method using conditioning, meditation, and other things (“Drugs?” asks McCoy. “Oh yes,” says Tom. “Lots of drugs"). When it was completed, he’d increased his inventive productivity, imagination, etc. as well as gaining a sense of humor. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat compulsive and adolescent sense of humor, and, among other things, it came out as practical jokes. After he gave a hot foot to a high Vulcan official, he was prosecuted for arson and criminal insanity. He fled the planet, so now he’s on the run.

Owing to vagaries in interstellar law, he’s not under any sort of Federation warrant, (the Vulcan Authorities do not want the details of the crimes made known, as one might expect) so Kirk allows Tom to make use of the docking facilities on the Enterprise to repair his craft. Spock assists, in hopes of learning some of the new drive technology etc. Besides the Vulcan repression thing is of importance to him personally.

A few days later, a Vulcan battle cruiser shows up and begins pacing the Enterprise. They can’t demand that Tom be handed over, because he’s broken no Federation Laws. But as soon as he leaves the ship…

After repairing his ship, Tom creates a distraction: a computer generated “entertainment” in the form of an old minstrel show, with Spock as Mr. Interlocutor, and Bones as, well, Mr. Bones. There is song and dance. There are jokes. It is all quite confusing to the Vulcans who are listening in. It’s fairly confusing to the humans on the Enterprise. The minstrel show allows a discussion of historical racism on Earth, and how it’s such a good thing that We’re Past That Now.

Tom uses the distraction to launch his repaired craft from the Enterprise. The Vulcan ship gives chase and fires a phaser beam at him.

It turns out that one of Tom’s inventions is a new kind of ship's shield, an “energy sponge,” that converts attacking energy (like the phaser blast), into ship’s power and motive force. The power of the Vulcan ship’s attack refuels Tom’s craft and he disappears in a burst of warp speed. The last, lingering signal from his craft is a sound like a bottle being rapidly stoppered and unstoppered, and a single “Beep, beep.”

In the coda, Kirk learns that Tom has given Spock the recipe for de-repression. Spock does not believe he can safely use or divulge it while still a Star Fleet Officer, but he will retire someday…

My agent sent in the Portion and Outline to whoever was editing the Star Trek novels at the time. We got back a rejection letter that said that the proposed novel was contrary to absolutely everything that had ever been said about Vulcans in the series or in the tie-in novels. Apparently, for once, I hadn’t been subtle enough.

Nietzsche and Me

We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex. – Hugh Hefner

Just for the record, I always found Hefner’s use of the editorial “we” somewhat jarring. The above sounds more like an invitation to group sex (with a single female participant) than a one-on-one dialog.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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Friedrich Nietzsche was a hard luck guy, no doubt about it. He was, for a time, an intimate of Richard and Cosima Wagner, then broke with them, in part because of Wagner’s anti-Semitism. His enormous output of philosophical work in the mid 1880s was greeted with what can most kindly be described as cool indifference by the intellectual community of Europe, and he suffered a complete mental breakdown in 1889, living another 11 years in full psychotic fugue. Suggestions as to the cause range from syphilis to brain cancer. If he had syphilis he probably contracted it from his time as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, his physical contacts with women somewhere between few and non-existent. In any case, Nietzsche certainly had some neurological complaint, as he frequently suffered from blinding headaches, yet continued to work in snatches punctuated by near total collapse, a situation that gives insight into what Nietzsche was getting at when he glorified the will.

After his collapse, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, took over his affairs. She and her husband were anti-Semites, fairly virulent ones, though it’s difficult at this distance for a non-historian to gauge whether “virulent” meant merely “average.” In any case, her editing of Nietzsche’s notebooks and publication as The Will to Power began the distortion of his legacy. Being appropriated by the Nazis as a forebear sealed his fate for the first half of the 20th Century. It didn’t help that Leopold and Loeb cited him as an inspiration. Very bad English translations can apparently be as pernicious as listening to Black Sabbath records played backwards.

And the first English translations of Nietzsche were very bad. I’ve read a few of them, and whoo boy. Nietzsche was a poet as well as a philosopher, and he wrote with wit and irony. Subtract those, and, well, you might as well think that Jonathan Swift really was in favor of cannibalism. It surely didn’t help that his most famous work, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), was also his most poetic and allegorical. Even most native German speakers didn’t know what to make of it.

Then there was the unfortunate fate of the word “Übermensch” first translated as “Superman.” “Strange visitor from another planet” wasn’t what Nietzsche had in mind, but there you are. Proto-Nazi or comic book inspiration, those were what the poor fellow had been reduced to.

Then, in the 1950s, one German-born, American academic philosopher, Walter Kaufman, set out to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation. It didn’t hurt that he taught at Princeton, and that he was a brilliant translator and a poet in his own right. First with books about Nietzsche, linking him to the existentialist tradition (a decided step up from Nazis and comic books), then with superb translations of Nietzsche’s own works, by the mid-1960s, Nietzsche the philosopher was respectable again. Indeed, he was more than respectable; he was hip.

Okay, there are various reasons why one might be embarrassed at having had a youthful fling with Ayn Rand, albeit in the Platonic sense, except that Rand despised Plato, and the phrase “in the Aristotelian sense,” doesn’t really, uh, make sense in this context. Nevertheless, I was young, open to new ideas (or new ones to me, anyway), and besides, among other things, she introduced me the Nietzsche. Not that this was her intention (or that she had even the vaguest notion of my very existence); indeed, she was attempting to warn me off.

In “Rolls Rex, King of Cars” my erstwhile collaborator Sharon Farber’s first story about a young girl named Billy Jean, she has Billy Jean’s hippie mother tell her not to go snooping around the farm next door, so the first thing that BJ does when left alone is make a bee line for the farm next door. I myself wasn’t quite that forthright. What happened was that I once found myself in a conversation with someone, comparing Rand and Nietzsche, and I realized that I hadn’t actually read the guy. If I kept that up, I figured that sooner or later, someone was going to think I was a nitwit, and I do not like being thought a nitwit. I especially don’t like it if the someone thinking I’m a nitwit is me.

(Since then I’ve learned that most intellectual discussions involve someone faking it at some point or another, basing their opinions on a book review, or a panel discussion, or the Cliff Notes version in one way or another. Furthermore, it is the height of impoliteness to point this out. Live and learn).

Anyway I got some of the Kaufman books and I read Nietzsche. And here’s the interesting thing: I found that, even when I disagreed with old Friedrich, he was still damned interesting to read. Stimulating. Informative. Manna for the budding intellectual, as it were.

Then I went to RPI, and in my freshman year, I assumed the editorship of the student magazine, Perspective. The two guys who had started it were seniors, and they were soon to be out of there anyway. They had a budget from the Student Union, so, hey, cool. I hadn’t made contact with science fiction fandom yet, so I didn’t know about all the folks making do with mimeograph and corflu; I had several hundred dollars to spend on full photo-offset printing, and I learned the most basic skill for getting people to do unpaid work (nagging). I managed to get two issues out, one my freshman year and the other my sophomore year and that was pretty much it for Perspective, but I had quite a bit of fun doing it.

Nietzsche was pretty much the patron saint of Perspective. Rich, one of the outgoing editors, had an article/essay in my first issue titled “Science and Tragedy.” At least, that was his title; I had to yank an illo at the last moment and for layout purposes, I changed the title to “Science and Apollo; Art and Dionysius.” That had been, more-or-less, nearly as I could tell, what he was driving at, a parallel between Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” except that Rich never mentioned Snow. He was, however, really pissed about my changing his title, which is entirely fair, and entirely my bad. I shouldn’t have done it, and my only excuse is that, if you appoint a freshman as editor of your magazine, you should expect some screwups.

There was also a guy named Greg who had written a pseudononymous critical letter about Perspective, as well as a couple of things for the school literary magazine, The Gorgon. I penetrated his pseudonym through the clever technique of getting drunk with one of his fraternity brothers. By “clever” I mean “totally accidental.” So I met with Greg one afternoon and had a nice chat, and son of a gun, yet another Nietzschean. These guys were just thick on the ground back then; I told you Nietzsche was hip.

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A Few Aphorisms from Nietzsche. Note: Don’t expect any of that “whatever does not kill me is a rope stretched across an abyss that looks back at you when you’re hunting monsters because God is dead” stuff. Better you should read The Nietzsche Family Circus.

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Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. "What? This person is low enough to love even me? Or stupid enough? Or -- or ---"

Sometimes in the course of conversation the sound of our own voice disconcerts us and misleads us into making assertions which in no way correspond to our opinions.

A sure means of irritating people and putting evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

Never to speak about oneself is a very noble piece of hypocrisy.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the best even of their blunders.

Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.

Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitered and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.

An injustice we have perpetrated is much harder to bear than an injustice perpetrated against us...

When our head feels too weak to answer the objections of our opponent our heart answers by casting suspicion on the motives behind his objections.

It is more comfortable to follow one's conscience than one's reason: for it offers an excuse and alleviation if what we undertake miscarries--which is why there are always so many conscientious people and so few reasonable ones.

One has to repay good and ill -- but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?